Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers

Myth, Ideology, Sovereignty

Georges DUInezil Myth~ Ideology~ Sovereignty RK: There is still some debate as to how exactly your work should be situated and classified. Is it primarily philosophical, sociological, anthropological, theological, or linguistic? Mter your early research, you begin to define your study of ancient myths and religions as "the comparative study of the Indo-European religions" or simply "IndoEuropean civilization," in contradistinction to the earlier title of"comparative mythology." How does this change in nomenclature describe your specific approach to myth and religion? GD: My work is primarily linguistic, or, to be more precise, philological . That is, the classification and interpretation of ancient myths in terms of textual structures or types. My first concern was to discover what the earliest texts of the various Indo-European civilizations might have in common, what similarities of/unction might exist in different mythic or religious orders to suggest a shared source. Eventually , I discerned the "Ideology of the Three Functions" ,........-Sovereignty, Force, and Fecundity,........-firstly in texts representative of diverse layers of Vedic, Germanic, and Roman civilization. And this led me to ascertain that there existed a specific conception of the three functions in all of the Indo-European cultures from India to Ireland. So myoriginal philological preoccupation to better understand the texts of Indian and classical poets, for instance, developed into a passion to understand the unrevealed ways of thought of their common ancestors. In Myth, Ideology, Sovereignty _ 53 short, philology enabled me to posit the existence of an underlying IndoEuropean ideology. This development meant of course that my work could no longer be accurately termed comparative mythologYl since the ideology of the three functions proved to be one of the chief characteristics of Indo-European civilization as a whole; it is not, for example, present in any articulate way in Mrican, American Indian, Chinese, or even biblical texts. And if they are present to a degree in the Aniki tradition of Polynesia, that probably results from very ancient and strong Indian components. Moreover, "mythology" itself became too limited a rubric, for the ideology of the three functions was also to be found in the religious, literary, philosophical, and even at times social, structures of IndoEuropean societies. RK: How does this approach differ, for instance, from the "anthropological " method of Claude Levi-Strauss or the "comparative phenomenological " method of Mircea Eliade? GD: Both Eliade's and Levi-Strauss's readings of the world of myth are very different from my own. Eliade's approach to myth strikes me as being primarily that of a man of letters. He interprets myth as a poet might, in terms of its inexhaustible mystery and sacredness. To see this, one only has to read his reflections on the myths of cyclical time and eternal return. But he differs of course from the ordinary poet in that he is a philosophising poet. He is concerned with the comparative study of the myths and rituals of different world civilizations in order to identify what he would see as the universal characteristics of man as a homo reLigiodLM. Levi-Strauss, on the contrary, is before all else a philosopher. His philosophy is essentially a criticaL philosophy, that is, a critical interrogation of the systems and structures which enable men to understand their world. Hence the term dtructuraLutl which is applied to him. RK: Ifyou differ from Eliade and Levi-Strauss in terms ofmethod,........, philological rather than poetic or philosophical,........,is it not true that you also differ in respect ofdu6ject matter? GD: Certainly. Eliade, though he began as a specialist of Eastern European culture (which he knew intimately as a Romanian) and Indian folklore (of which he also had firsthand acquaintance from his visits there in the 1930s), analyzes material from all or most of the world religions. He was also a talented philologist and linguist. But his overriding interest is a "comparative phenomenology," that is, a 54 • Georges Dumezil reflective description of the "essential meaning" of the totality of ancient myths, rituals, and symbols still available to modern research. LeviStrauss , for his part, specializes in the study of the religions of peoples without writing. This is what he calls "savage thought" (La pendee dauvage) with no derogatory intent, because it precedes and precludes historical transposition into a developing or evolving literature (what he calls "diachronic" culture). Levi-Strauss's principal subject matter is, accordingly, the culture of the Latin-American Indian, where the symbolic and ritual...